US Retailer Target Struck Again by Online & Payment Processing Downtime

US retailer Target faced issues with its online presence yesterday, Tuesday 24^th September 2019, when its website experienced an outage.  The downtime not only impacted Target’s sales website but also its mobile application as well as payment processing in-store.

Responding to CNBC the retailer told the news channel that “as the result of a payment processing issue, some Target guests were temporarily unable to make purchases at Target stores and at Target.com, [but that] within an hour, technology teams identified and began to remedy the issue to limit the impact on our guests. This was not a security-related issue. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate our guests’ patience.”

Target has experienced several issues with its systems this year.  Earlier in June, its in-store registers were offline for two hours following an “internal technology issue”.  After that incident Target’s shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange fell almost 2% with industry experts suggesting that the inability to take payments could have cost the company as much as USD $100m in lost sales.

With 7.3% of all Target’s US$ 76.4bn revenue originating online the retailer will want to ensure that as Black Friday and the holiday season approaches that its systems are robust and not going to experience similar issues at such an important time for sales.  For Target not only will the downtime have hurt sales, but longer term it will also be concerned about the reputational fallout, with it being reported that around 1,100 tweets on social media about Target’s issues during yesterday’s outage.

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